those things, and with the benefit of some distance make some judgments. >> take a little while from now. let's go back to the beginning. you were born in chicago, grew up in illinois which was not quite as prosperous account as it is nowadays. and went to high school, and went on to princeton. was that a culture shock coming from the midwest? >> it was indeed. i was told by the dean of the school i was going to go to a big ten school and wrestle. and the dean said no, no, you got to go to princeton. and i said, why? he said that's where you belong. and i said i can't go there, i don't have the money. he said i will get you a scholarship, which he did. so i went and, of course, most of the people that had gone to private school. it taken the freshman courses

before, and i got there and i worked my head off. i spent all the time in the library or playing football or wrestling. and never did much other than that. there were no women in the school. it rained a lot. [laughter] not my first choice. and joyce, white -- my wife year was at the university of colorado scheme their way through college. it was a totally different experience for me. >> and you also heard a little talk by a princetonian who would run for president, and nominated once said it's not in the book, but until you actually know some of those words almost by heart. >> i do. >> tell us it was first of all. >> it was my senior banquet in 1954, and the former governor of illinois named adlai stevenson had lost to dwight eisenhower already in 52 and he later lost

in 56. and it was our senior banquet in college and he came to speak at princeton. is a princeton graduate. and he gave the most eloquent and persuasive speech about public service that i had ever heard or will ever hear. it was an evening event, and all of us just sat there listening to this brilliant -- he called himself an agent, and he said, what was it, something about -- >> eggheads unite? >> exactly. and i think all of us who were getting ready to go into the military, all of us came away with a sense of responsibility and one of the things he said

was that young people in our country have responsibility to help guide and direct the course of our country. and that the power of the american political system is virtually without measurement. and if america were to stumble, the world would fall. and it had an impact on me, and i have put up a website with hundreds of memos that i believe support the book that we've got here. and you can go to an end note and go to the website and accuracy the entire memo if i quote a paragraph. i'm almost positive with a adlai stevenson speech on that website. and i highly recommend it. it is a wonderful inspiring speech. >> although it did not get you to become a democrat obviously. was there any point in early

life that you would've been anything but a republican? >> oh, my goodness, yes. during world war ii my father was in the navy on the kerry. and franklin roosevelt was about the only president in my lifetime between 1932, and i guess he was sworn in in 33, and i was born in july of 32, but i never knew herbert hoover personally. but franklin roosevelt was the president. he represent the united states of america in wartime. my parents, i and everyone i knew looked to him as the leader of our country. and it was enormously important speaker for a young man. >> and you were so taken with adlai with what he said, you ran for congress at the age of 29,

very dark course, 1962. most people don't run for congress that early, at least they didn't in those days as you said. it was younger than it is nowadays. what moved you to get in so soon? >> well, i was the longest of long shots. i had been away from my home district or a decade. icon for years to college for three and half years in the navy, and it worked in washington for two congress, congressman, one from ohio and one from michigan. i never been a congressman before in my life. then i got back to chicago, home, and suddenly out of the blue a woman who was the congresswoman who had succeeded her husband, and it occupied the congressional district from 1932 until 1960, and she announced she was going to run for reelection. and i thought to myself, my goodness, that same family has owned that digital my entire lifetime. either you may run -- you may

not get another chance. so i talked to joyce, and she's game, she said. and we got a whole bunch of friends from high school and college, and god bless them, they went out there and formed -- i think would something like 1500 volunteers helping, and people running around with car tops saying rumsfeld for congress in the rings and buttons, bumper sticker's. and sure enough, i was fortunate. one of the things that might've helped, michael, is president kennedy had gotten elected to years before. and he was so young -- >> he'd run for congress at 29th. >> then he served in the senate for part every term and then he ran for president. but he was a young president. he had been elected and he was so attractive and charming and humorous spirit and the second president you saw. you post a picture with eisenhower during the campaign, and then as a new congressman, i think within your first couple

of months went to the white house and that can be? >> i did indeed. but the fact that we had such an attractive young president had an appeal in a district that medicare 29 years old when for congress look like maybe you could i could be a congressman. >> and so it proved to be. you came to washington and among the things you did in washington, and you write about in the book was, the briefing by lyndon johnson on vietnam. and tell a little bit about that because you spoke up in that briefing in a way i think very few people did. >> this wonderful ice present, hubert humphrey was called the happy warrior and just a wonderfully energetic and appealing person, he was vice president and he had just come back from vietnam. vietnam is increasingly becoming a major political factor in the country cannot be my first ran in 62, but by then i suppose of

64 or 66 -- >> i think 65. >> so president johnson was getting complaints that members of congress didn't feel they were being informed about the war. and so -- >> how ever they could have said such a thing? >> i know it. so he invited the members of congress down to the white house come and we all went down, at least a large number went down to 101 and 50 of us. and it was winter as i recall. the invitation came late and we went in, and it's not nothing for young congressman to be sitting in the white house getting briefed by the president and the vice president just coming back from vietnam. and hubert humphrey start to give a briefing, and lyndon baines johnson was commander-in-chief couple and he was bigger than life. he would pop up every time someone would say something and answer the question. and hubert we just about be ready to answer, and stop. and lyndon johnson would take

over. >> that's pretty much the way it was. >> yes, indeed. he was a powerful figure. >> and johnson was talking about the things he was doing to win the war, and she piped up and said like bombing homes? >> he was, you know, as a congressman, listening to him i was probably more critical than i would have been as a member of the executive branch being asked questions by members of congress. so where you stand time depends on where you sit. but he was going through a period where he was trying to figure out what to do in the war in vietnam, and he would go through a heavy bombing period, and would be a bombing pause and he would hope that that would cause a positive reaction from the north vietnamese. or at the con. and it didn't. he and explain what he was doing

was asked the question by democratic congressman named young from texas about why it wasn't working. and his answer was in effect that it would work. and, of course, the fact was, if you do something for a period and then stopped completely, it's confusing. it's confusing to our people. it's confusing to the enemy. and i did ask a question and tried to get some response from him as to how that combination of often on was going to work. and he said, well, the way it's going to work is more the same. and at that point he was in a bombing pause. which suggested that it might not work. and, of course, it didn't. he had a tough job as president, and he did his best. >> and read respect what you think his big mistakes were on

vietnam, making decisions the way it was fought? >> well, i was in his shoes and it's hard to say for sure, -- i wasn't in issues and it's hard to say for sure. in the last analysis that country was going to have to find its way itself. and the task we had was not to try to go after the north vietnamese or the vietcong alone, because all they have to do was disappear. they didn't have to fight a single battle. they could just disappear and a week later show back up. they could go harvest the rice and then come right back. and you couldn't want u.s. forces from wind of the country to the other, and they would've just disappeared into the countryside. and then when you passed they would come right back. in my view in retrospect, the benefit of hindsight, the task was ready to try to get the south vietnamese government capable of organizing and

training and equipping their own forces, and providing something for the people of south vietnam and the rest of vietnam that offered a promise for them for a future. and i think ho chi minh was more successful in suggesting to the vietnamese people that the future under him would be brighter for those people. and there was an argument made that the south vietnamese government was corrupt and out of touch with the people. that's not unusual in the world for governments to be labeled corrupt. a great many othe of the governs in the world are corrupt. and i don't know that the north vietnamese government under ho chi minh was not corrupt. that was an argument, and the combination of those things i think created a very difficult circumstance for lyndon johnson and the united states of america. >> and in 1968 richard nixon was elected.

he comes to you and asks you to take on the office of economic, and opportunity, one of the crown jewels of the great society, not very popular with the public or nixon basically wanted to dismantle it. not a great career move for you, i think, but you did it. what was your rationale? >> i voted against the legislation when it was passed. sargent shriver the recently passed away had been a person who headed up the office of economic opportunity, and it started under president kennedy, and he and his brother, bobby kennedy in the justice department, had fashioned a program to try to assist the poor in the country. and then president johnson came in with his big texas approach, and enlarged it and it became the war to eradicate poverty. and if you define poverty as a certain percentage of our

population, and then you try to eradicate it, it's not possible because there's always going to be a certain percentage that is in that category. and they immediately started a host of programs. that was it there was in the job core, head start, migrant programs, health care programs, drug programs, community action programs. there must've been 1212 or 15 different programs under this umbrella, the war on poverty. the design was it would bypass governors and mayors, elected officials. and, of course, that had the effect of angering republican and democrat mayors and public officials. because the money would come straight from the federal government to organizations, community organizations that were described as having maximum -- the maximum feasible participation of the poor, was

the concept. and bypassing the mayors. and, of course, what they started to do was oppose local government. so local city councils and local state governments were constantly being harassed -- it was a legal services program as well. we had the federal government supplied money which been filed lawsuits against mayors and governors and city councils, all of the people, regardless of the political party. it had nothing to do with politics. it was against the structure. so by the time i went in there it was widely disliked. >> but here you are pashtun we're talking budget as a possible future president isn't this sort of a graveyard for something like that? >> well, joyce has somewhat unusual sense of humor. and one night i got home and i went to the icebox, and there was a little sign that said he tackled the job that couldn't be

done with a smile he went right to it, tackle the job that couldn't be done, and couldn't do it. [laughter] you laugh. at 10:00 at night when is reaching in for a soda pop and reading that, that slows you down, i'll tell you. [laughter] >> so you did that. he went on to the nixon white house, and you write in the book that you wanted to leave washington after the election of 1972. did you see watergate coming? >> no. i didn't at all. you know, one time someone wrote -- i ended up going over to nato, ambassador to nato right after 1972 election. and the pundits in washington couldn't believe that i would leave the seat of power, i was a member of the cabinet in the white house, and sadly i'm going off to brussels, belgium. it look like siberia to political people in the white house because proximity to power

is considered in washington what one would want. and i didn't -- i went thousands of miles in the opposite direction. some wag wrote in some magazine in washington, after watergate broke, who's the smartest man in washington? answer, don rumsfeld. stated, but he is not in washington. answer, that's right. [laughter] and i got a reputation for being smart instead of lucky. i had no more idea what was going on -- and me, richard nixon had just been reelected by one of the biggest margins in history of the country. he won every state and union except massachusetts and the district of columbia. and no one could imagine that i would want to get away, that i would want to be away from that as oppose to write in the middle of the. but we did. we took our family and went to belgium, and we had a truly wonderful experience representing our country.

>> and the gerald ford becomes president after nixon resignation. your great friend, colleague in the house the 1960s. he came in saying he wanted a staff that would be the spoke of the wheel, everyone would report directly to the president. you were brought in after a month when he thought that was not working. was that a time, you know, it's been said a lot people to work for president ford were very much impressed with the fact that presidential power was so much -- did you see signs of that? >> gerald ford was a legislator. and he was a minority leader. and he functioned on the spokes of the wheel concept where anyone could come to see them. and he liked -- you is gracious, wonderfully warm deep and debated anyone who wanted to have access to him could. and as minority leader of the united states house of representatives, that work. in fact, it was popular.

a president of the united states can't do that. it just doesn't work. it's dysfunctional. and he had watched the nixon white house, and i believe he believed that part of the reason for nixon's downfall was that there was what was called the berlin wall, this white house staff system run by bob haldeman and john girlie man that they called the berlin wall because they both had names that sounded germanic. he did not want that, and he said -- he established this and for cs al qaeda to stay on and it turned out he felt he couldn't keep how and allied commander in europe. and he asked me to coming. and i told him i wouldn't do it. at couldn't be done, that the monkey designed was not going to work. and he said i know that now, but

i want to have to get from where i am to where i want to be and just give me a little slack while we navigate over to a rational white house and chief of staff system. >> what i think a little bit, dick cheney said serving as chief of staff as your successor under president ford, he had summoned signs of the fact that presidents were constrained in the wake of watergate, congress was moving in and the courts to some extent. he said when he became vice president that one of the things he hope to do was expand presidential power and potential the other way. did you feel the same way? >> when you have an embattled president functioning in a white house that at that point was deemed illegitimate, watergate had drained the reservoir of trust in our country. and for the first time in our history a president of the united states had to resign. it was a stunning event in our

country come in the world. and when you drain the reservoir of trust, which is how we govern in our country, we don't govern by command. we govern by persuasion as your leadership, and you simply, you have to be able to persuade. and if there's no trust, you can't persuade. people don't respond. and the white house was in a terrible, terrible, terrible circumstance. the effect of that was that he had a dilemma. should he go for continuity, which would reassure the american people that he, a total unknown who have never been elected president or vice president with no campaign staff, no platform, no knowledge about the country having campaigned the country, no base of support, he felt the need to

reassure the country that there would be continuity and policies. the alternative would've been, which i favor, that he would favor change. my view was that if that institution of the white house was deemed illegitimate, and not trustworthy, then-president ford had to create sufficient change that it would be seen not as a continuum of a nixon-ford white house, but as a ford white house. and he needed to make enough changes in the cabinet and the staff that people would see them as stepping forward with a new team. he opted for continuity, and they depend the. >> you think he shouldn't of? >> i don't. i think he should have made enough changes. he was such a decent, kind man. he said i don't want to let anyone ago and have it appear that they did something wrong because there were a handful of people who did something wrong

in that white house. and it was not a large number, and there were truly wonderful people there. pat moynihan was there and alan greenspan was there, and george shultz was there. a host of -- dr. stein and dr. whitman and so many people of wonderful reputations. and gerald ford it just could not bring himself to firing anybody. he just didn't want to do it. because he felt it would be a tarnish on their reputation. >> unlike them. you later -- a story about how the elder president bush, george h.w. bush, went to the cia in 1975. do you want to tell us briefly the story and what you feel the real story was? >> what you mean what i feel the real story was? >> well -- >> what the real story was. >> the false story and then god's truth. >> god's truth, now you're talking. [laughter] george herbert walker bush came

to congress i think in 1966. i had been elected in 62. he came in with a wonderful group of people and a new him and served in the congress with them, and he at some point ended up i think running for the senate. and then he went over to china as our representative. and he wanted to come back, and he told president ford that he wanted to come back and serve in an executive position. and i was chief of staff of the white house, and periodically i would ask by the president to send in a group of names to the attorney general or director of cia when bill colby said he wanted to leave, or some other cabinet officer, department of housing and urban development or what have you. and so the staff in the white house would produce these documents of here are six or eight names of people, here are the pros and cons, and your other people who favor these, where they rank them. and the present would look at them and ask that the fbi take a check or ask other people do that them out.

and that kind of a thing when and when the president said that director colby wanted to leave the cia. bush's name was on that list. that the staff produced. and people had him first, second, third, above the line or below the line. and for whatever reason there was a myth that was created that because i had been considered for vice president when president ford picked nelson rockefeller, and george bush, herbert walker bush had considered that we were competitive. so the myth came out that when he was sent to the cia, the senate said we won't confirm you unless you agree that you will not be vice president. so it kind of ruled him out. and i told president ford i thought he should do that, definitely not allow the senate to tell them who he should have

as a vice presidential nominee. i urged him not to agree to it. the facts are that george herbert walker bush beg the president to tell him he would not be vp, he wanted to be director of the cia. his wife i think wrote a book and said he was thrilled to be nominated for that, and somehow the myth came around that i was the one who masterminded all of this and arranged for him not to be considered for vice president spent and you right in the book that he believes that. >> i don't know that he believes it. i know that the myth persisted. and i finally was tired of it and i wrote president ford and said, give me a letter that tells me what the facts are. and he will back and said you're quite right, george herbert walker bush beg to be head of the cia, wanted to be headed the cia, was delighted to be head of the cia and you had nothing to do with it.

and that's the long and short of it. >> okay. >> in our world, narratives and theories get strung out over a period of time until it's like they are chipped in stone and two, notwithstanding the fact that they are totally based in midair without any roots or substance to them at all. >> in this case. so let's move the clock up since we don't have a lot of time. 2000, george bush, the son, is elected president and you go and see and. did you have any thought to be asked to go into the cabinet? >> no, i was an old man. [laughter] joyce and i had gone to our 50th high school reunion in illinois, and in the year 2000 i think in september, and joyce, with her perception and wisdom and foresight announced to our friends that this was the beginning of our rural period. this was in september of 2000, and we had no more idea in the

world that i would end up back in government, in no particular desire to. we were happy and life is good. i had been in business for a period of years spent in a very successful. tell us about that. >> and served as chairman of several government commissions, one of the ballistic missile threat and one on space, and felt that i was contributing in a volunteer way. >> when you became secretary of defense, how have things changed at the pentagon, and just washington in general, since 1977? >> i wish any actual numbers but for one thing congressional staff had ballooned and had grown by a multiple of two, three or four. the defense authorization bill was a piece of legislation that the congress passed in each house and then they had a conference and there's a piece of paper, papers that represent the authorization bill telling the department of defense what

it can do for the next year. when i left as secretary of defense in 1976, the defense authorization bill had 74 pages. when i came back in the year 2001, the defense authorization bill had something like 574 pages. that's going to be off by a few but it is good enough for government work. you get a sense of what had changed. what has changed is the department of defense is enormous, and there's no way it can be efficiently run. the government is almost inherently inefficient because it can't die. it doesn't go away, unlike a business. you drive down any street in philadelphia and you will see a retail operation that was there one day and it's gone the next. it can fill. government just stays there. so the inefficiencies compound,

and the effect of it is that it is not efficient. and to the extent something is not efficient than the congress concerned about representing their constituents, feeling of responsibility for oversight, legislative oversight, sees something wrong and besides the way to fix it is to require another report, or to hire more people to monitor something. or to have more hearings and to look into the. so what you see is how many people are old enough to remember gulliver's travels? remember gulliver? he was a great big guy, and gulliver finally all the little ones but so me threats over gulliver he couldn't move. and no one of those threads was doing the job. it was the thousands of threads that prevented gulliver from moving. and that's what we have arrived in government.

we have so much oversight and so many pages of micro-requirements, and so many reports to be filed, that it consumes just an enormous amount of time. and there are over 10,000 lawyers in the department of defense. imagine, i get nothing -- i get nothing against lawyers, but i don't know how any lawyer speak there's some lawyers walking out of the room right now expect i don't not it how any organization can function with 10,000 lawyers. [laughter] >> just kidding. [laughter] >> i'm going to push you to get to the rest of this because we'll have much time and i want to get to the other things that happened obviously during that decade. 9/11, in retrospect do you think that 9/11 could have been averted, let's say, if you are sort of able to rewind the tape and get an early present to behave differently? would that have resolve some of

the things the president to do or not do? >> you know, i'm not one who can answer a question like that. on the one and just lie to you can say to yourself, there must've been something that might have been done differently. on the other hand the task of the intelligence community is truly difficult. it's a very, very tough job. the world is a big place. the terrorist networks and the closed societies in many countries make it enormously difficult to gather intelligence that can be useful and actionable. in my adult life i have seen literally dozens of instances where our intelligence community has failed to predict something.

there was a very fine book called pearl harbor by roberta wohlstetter, and the forward to that book was written by i think he was at harvard at the time, dr. thomas schelling, and he wrote this forward about surprise. and to characterize pearl harbor as a failure of imagination. and, of course, there were so many hearings after pearl harbor, what might have been done, who might have known this, was right on the concentration of our battleships and mobilize and vulnerable as they work with all of our planes on the ground, on a sunday morning. i look back on 9/11 and i am aware of the reappraisals and the lessons learned, studies

that have been done, and there's no question but that the fact that the united states of america, in the case of somalia, after being attacked old back. in an instance in haiti was attacked, and some ships pulled away. and i think he was bosnia, some folks went across the line and were captured or and we pulled back several kilometers. in lebanon after the marines were killed in the barracks there at the airport in beirut, the united states withdrew their forces. after the khobar towers and the uss cole were attacked by terrorists, the reaction of the united states was minimal i would say. there was some cruise missiles launched on a couple of occasions, but if you think about it that terrorists that organizes these kinds of

activities, they don't have countries to defend. they don't have populations to defend. they don't have real estate and infrastructure that they want to protect. they operate in the shadows. and you can launch an awful lot of cruise missiles and drop an awful lot of bombs and do precious little damage to a terrorist network. they came away having drawn a lesson, and have said as much, osama bin laden has said on many occasions on video that the united states was a paper tiger, and if the united states is hit it will react, it will withdraw. it will reach out and do damage to the people imposing that damage on our country. so someone could make a case that that pattern, that weakness is provocative, that to the extent we behave in a manner that is weak and allows those kinds of things, that it

provokes. they would not think of doing it if they felt it would be instantaneous punishment for doing it. but listen, the last thing i would do would be to say that there was something somebody could've done to have prevented september 11. i just -- i was a it's like pearl harbor. it was a failure of imagination, and probably a relatively understandable failure of imagination. >> made a couple of questions from the audience. one is about iraq and vietnam. do you think about the fair comparison? speak with their certainly similarities and there are notable differences between the two. the vietnamese were not likely to come and attack the united states of america. the terrorist threat, the

dangers -- in iraq, and was on the terrorist list. the terrorist threat was a very real one to our country. and al qaeda have demonstrated that it would come and attack america. now, there was no direct link between al qaeda and iraq. there certainly was between afghanistan and iraq. and iraq was on the terrorist list. and iraq had a pattern of having to build weapons of mass destruction. so there was -- do with these things that affected it. what i would say that -- or, i think the differences were greater than the similarities, but there certainly were similarities. >> how about the case of johnson to you and i both know a lot of people who worked for lyndon johnson, and one thing often say, the tough thing for them is

when some comes into them and says i lost my son in vietnam, why did he die? what would you say for iraq? >> it is the hardest thing. i think anyone who is in a position of responsibility, when a conflict occurs and you, as joyce and i would go to the hospitals and meet with appointed whose lives are changed forever, meet with their families and meet with the families of those who have been killed, we would think to ourselves we are going in, what is it that we could say or do that would help them understand the appreciation that we and america have for the sacrifice, the individual sacrifices and the sacrifices of families as well. because they sacrifice and they serve. and we would come out of those

meetings almost invariably inspired, not feeling that we helped them but feeling that they have helped us. the pride they have in their service, the cohesion they feel with the units they were in, the desire to get back to their units, you just could not fail to come out of those meetings inspired by the young men and women. the big difference between the vietnam war and the conflicts today is that, thanks to milton friedman and richard nixon and the congress, we have an all-volunteer military. every single one of those people who serve our country serve because they wanted to serve. they serve because they consciously decided they wanted to raise their hand and go and

help protect our country. and that dedication and that patriotism and pride that they feel is so powerful. now, how does one answer that? i guess the answer is that -- >> what the johnson people said, they will push us to say except what the sacrifice was made for. does anyone ever do that when you see them? >> scheuer. >> world war ii i assume, that's not hard, but a war like iraq or vietnam or something that's not, you know, a full throttle. what do you say? >> a war that is armies against navy, air forces against air force's, that's clear. that's understandable. it starts and ends. it ended in world war ii on the uss missouri, the battleship with the signing ceremony. what we went through in the cold

war was quite different. it was many decades long. it was an ideological competition of ideas. >> and there was never going to be a signing ceremony. >> what we're in today is much more like that. it is a longer period of time. it's a marathon, not a sprint. it is a competition of ideas, but for whatever reason, we are hesitant and not skillful in engaging in the competition of ideas. we recognize that the overwhelming majority of the muslims on the face of this earth are fine people who have a religion that made it be different from christianity or judaism or other religions, but they are not radical. they are not terrorist. they are fine people, and yet there's a small minority that have engaged in terrorist acts that organize to do those things. and we reluctant as americans to

take up that debate and compete with those ideas. they are not reluctant. they are out recruiting to their out raising money. they are out organizing, and they are out planning attacks against the nationstate concept. because they have a conviction that is their calling to do that. so, the fact that we are not willing to engage in that debate, or not skillful added or reluctant to do it, leads people with a vagueness as to why, why people have to do things. the wonderful thing i've found with the men and women in the armed forces is that they are there on the whether they are serving in korea or in bosnia or in iraq or afghanistan, they know what they're doing. they understand it or they are proud of what they are doing. and thanks to modern communications and e-mails, they are able to communicate with

their families, and their families end up having a sense of what they're doing and why they are doing it. and when there's a loss of life, it is heartbreaking. when there's a loss of limb, it's heartbreaking. and yet you talk to those families and you talk to those people, and they don't ask why was i there. they know why they were there. and they are proud to say we are there. and we are very fortunate country. >> that's for sure. you were a very -- [applause] >> and you have seen a lot of lives. and i guess what i was thinking of -- >> you are the leading scholar on presidential leadership and he's going to ask me a question on leadership. [laughter] i feel like i am back in school. >> some do. some just write about it.

but when people in my line of work right about george w. bush, what you think would be the shortcomings? >> i'm 78 years old. i've lived a third of our country's history, and almost every republican president was considered not very swift. dwight eisenhower played too much golf they said. he had a poor syntax. mike goodes, gerald -- gerald ford they simply too much football about how it. it didn't matter he went to yale law school picketed matthew for the world's leading experts on u.s. budget, having served on the appropriations committee. >> not to mention the best athlete in the white house. >> exactly. and they continued he was a stumblebum. you go from one to -- while reagan, characterized by clark clifford as an amiable dunce.

and then people read his letters and saw that this man was thoughtful, knowledgeable, and wound not a micromanager, a strategic leader. and a superb and highly successful strategic leader. george w. bush was described as not curious, not knowledgeable, and he had gone to harvard business school. yet gone to yale i guess. and was clearly is an intelligent human being. i mean, i didn't know the man. i've worked with his father in congress but i didn't know george w. bush. and i watched him as a president, and he clearly ask penetrating questions. he worked his way with foreign leaders in a skillful and engaging manner that developed relationships that were constructed for our country. and yet, people made fun of him.

all of those presidents. i don't know quite what it is about our society that does that, but i must say i've watched a lot of presidents and i would say that george w. bush -- you think what he did with the surge in iraq. >> is that something you would have supported had you stayed on? >> in d. what he did was interesting. a lot of things combine to make it work. the anbar awakening took place. the training equippage of the iraqi military had come to a very advanced point where we at hundreds of thousands of iraqis trained and ready to participate. the iraqi government had matured and was beginning to provide more skillful political leadership in the country. let what he did, but he added i

forget what it was, 20, 20,000 additional troops. we had done that to three times. he galvanized the situation in iraq by his boldness. when the congress was about ready to cut off the funds, he made a decision to increase the number of troops, and it caused the people in iraq to say oh, my goodness, he means business. he's not looking for a way out. he's looking for a way to win. and that caused a political situation in that country to jail and coalesce, and the maliki government went into the south and took care of some of the dissidents. the so-called not the army that is sadr army which was in an army, it's a group of people that can get industry to make demonstration. they went quiet because they didn't know what would happen. but the center of gravity of that war had shifted from iraq to the united states, as they say in the military the center of gravity, the real focus of

the problems in the united states. that congress was about to pull the plug and the funny as they did in vietnam. and the boldest of what george w. bush did galvanize the political situation spirit and made it more possible for the war to be successful in in. >> and he deserves a lot of credit for the. >> how much they were beat judged by its success? let's say lyndon johnson for had ended in victory and by 66. would we be looking at him as a great war leader and someone who did the right thing? >> you're the historian. it seems to me that -- i don't know who said it but wars are a series of catastrophes and by success or victory. they are difficult, hard. the enemy has a brain. eisenhower i think said the plan is worthless. planning is everything in the plan is worthless. is the in the --

>> that's one of rumsfeld's rules. >> when i say rumsfeld rules. it's a rule i quote from someone more intelligent than i am. >> with full credit. >> indeed. but it's true. every time you try to do something. for every office visit defense. for every defense than offense. there's a constant change that takes place on the battlefield. i think that we are unlikely for a period of time to end up with the kind of clarity we had in world war ii. because of nature of the world we're living in. it is asymmetric. it's not symmetric. it is ever-changing, and it is going to be a challenge for our leadership. it's going to be a challenge for our country. but the growing lethality of those weapons, when president bush was faced with, when he

made his decision on iraq, was that there was a study by johns hopkins university called dark winter, and if my memory serves me correctly, what -- a series of experts got together and they said what if we took smallpox and put in three locations in the united states of america. and in a relatively short period of months, the dark winter exercise done by johns hopkins university, concluded and i'm going to be run by a bit, but conclude that something in the neighborhood of 800,000 americans would be dead. someone here knows that exact number. is that -- where is keith? no keith. that's close enough. and that something -- a multiple of that would be infected with

smallpox. and imagine in a country is that happen. think of the martial law that would be imposed. think of the inability to move from state to state. i mean, free people, that's what we are. we are people who want to get up in the morning and go where we want, say what we want, think what we want. and the purpose of terrorism is not to kill people. the purpose is to terrorize. is to alter your behavior. and imagine this country if we had 800,000 people dead from smallpox, and martial law imposed across our country. and that existed is available. and it is that concerned that caused george w. bush, his administration, to step up and decide that you couldn't wait to be attacked again. the only thing you could do would be to decide to try to put pressure on terrorist states and put pressure on terrorist

networks and make every single thing they do harder. harder to raise money, harder to move, harder to communicate with each other. and keep the pressure up so that they can't collect themselves to the point where they couldn't engage in attacks like that against our country. >> we've got just a couple more minutes so i will ask to more questions. one is what should a historian right about donald rumsfeld the second time in the pentagon? >> i think i would give it 10 or 20 years. i think perspective is good. journalists like to think that they write the first draft of history. i don't know that i would use the word history with that first draft. i served a love years in government. now i've been out for four. and i debated whether i should write a short book in a year and use my memory, or whether i

should digitize this incredible archive that either chelated over my lifetime, and start inviting people in to discuss the faces of my life and events that i've been involved in. and if you look in the acknowledgments section, i don't how many people are listed, but it's many, many, many dozens. and we would talk and transcribed and then we would go back to the records. and then i said if i've got that archive, why shouldn't we digitize it and see if we can make it available to the reader. and i'm told that maybe for the first time we now are going to have available in e-book which means electronic book, i'm told -- [laughter] they didn't used to have those when i was a kid there and you can read the book and you can look at the end note and see the source where i cited something. and then you can go to the website and pull up the entire

document and see right there whether or not the context or the prospectus i've provided, which i worked just like the dickens to try to make it accurate and fair and correct. you can then look at the entire document and say to yourself, g., i would've done it this way or what i would've done it that way. there are thousands of pages of doctors, hundreds of different documents, many of which have been recently declassified that are available on this website. >> which is great. we will have the doctors but what do we write in 20 years about your state and the pentagon? >> and 20 years i will be 98 years old. you can write whatever you want. [laughter] [applause] >> a final question. this book as i mentioned has very detailed accounts of

secretary rumsfeld encounters with all sorts of public figures, world leaders, people in very influential and important positions. but maybe one of the most intriguing is your encounter with elvis. why don't you tell us about that? >> oh, my goodness, elvis presley. a lot of his songs were really not my thing. [laughter] >> why does that not surprise me? >> but on any given sunday, today, if joyce and i can't get to church, we have some elvis pressley takes singing gospel, and they are wonderful. i replayed in sunday after sunday after sunday. how did all this happen? when i was really the so-called war on poverty, sammy davis, jr. was on the advisory board. he cared about the country and

he cared about the poor and i was out in las vegas giving a speech and it happened to coincide with his 100th performance at one of those casinos. the sand or something. and so we went to see his show. and he and his wife were there. and he performed, and he was spectacular. it wasn't at accident because sammy davis, jr. the world's greatest entertainer. just a superb entertainer. he said to joyce enemy, the next night i'm off on going to take you to see the best entertainer in las vegas. and he didn't tell us who it was. so the next night we went. we went to another casino, and we went in and he got a dinner table. needless to say it was right up front, if you're sammy davis and las vegas you get a good table. the four of us sat down and it was elvis presley. fannie believed elvis was the best performer in town.

and he was in, in his later years, and he was large and he was wearing a sequined jumpsuit. >> not quite uniform of an ex-white house employed. >> and, of course, i've never seen a man and i never heard the man. and he had these -- what colors, isn't chartreuse? red, pink? scarlet? he had scarlet scarves and he would wipe his face. he would stand up there and sing and it was fantastic that he was in the most ridiculous thing in the world and people would cheer and yell and love it. and i sit there and go like this, oh, my goodness. then he would sing a ballad and it was absolutely beautiful. i mean, this man had a voice that was spectacular. and i loved country music and i love the ballots, and he would sing and it would just -- he

would take the scarf, wipe his face, the sweat off and sort out in the track and everyone would scream. so he threw one down to our police davis and she gave it to joyce. and it is framed. [laughter] but what happened was afterwards sami said to joyce and me, come on, we're going to go back to the dressing room. i'm not the type who hangs around las vegas dressing rooms. and you go in this place and it is large and are all these people. sam is getting dressing is watching around and all of the showgirls are there and there are very attractive women with trades selling cigarettes and selling western jewry and turquoise and what have you come and all the hangers on and the staff at one and they're all milling around. choice gets carried away and she's talking to somebody and she couldn't find me. and she finally looked around the room and went off in the corner, elvis presley had me

cornered. i was against the corner, and he was -- he's big and he's like this and i was kind of hidden right behind them. he was talking about the united states army. if you remember, there was a draft during that period, and some of the people did not go in the draft. they went to canada or they refused. and he went in and served and the united states army, and he served in germany, and he wanted to talk about it. he loved the army. he valued his time surfing. and he was sitting there going back and forth with me about this and that and the other thing. and i just found it fascinating that he was this man to a minute ago had been up there wiping the sweat off his face and throwing these things and everyone screaming, and here were all these gorgeous women walking around this dressing room. and he was standing there asking a question after question about

the united states army. it says a lot for the man. >> indeed. what can i do after that but say thank you, mr. secretary. thank you all for being here. [applause] >> this event was hosted by the national constitution center in philadelphia. to find out more visit constitutioncenter.org. .. >> swh what it's for is the top

20 companies that do the best job at censoring contests. so what goes on in china, china has a system where it's not only censoring at the network level so when you try and access a web site, you suddenly get an error message or something like that. but, you you know, most people n china are using the chinese version of youtube, they're using a chinese company that has their social networking sites, various blog hosting platforms. and all those companies are required by the government to police not only, you know, porn or copyright stuff which companies here have to do, but also police the platforms for a whole range of political content. and they get regular instructions from the authorities, and if they don't do a good enough job of keeping the stuff off their sites, they can lose their business license. and if they do a good job, they get rewarded. and one of the rewards is this self-discipline award.

>> who sits on the chinese internet society? >> well, the internet society of china, it's officially a nongovernmental organization, but it's actually sort of very close hi aligned with the -- closely aligned with the government. so it has, actually, the chairman of it is a computer scientist, but who's actually, you know, is not going to do anything the government doesn't want done. >> host: rebecca mackinnon, how did you get interested in chinese censorship on the internet issues? >> guest: well, it goes way back. i used to work as a journalist in china, i worked for cnn. i was there in the '90s when the internet first showed up there commercially in 1995, and very soon, you know, they were trying to use the internet to do our job, and we were finding we were getting blocked. so i've kind of experienced et as a -- it as a user from the

very beginning. but then after, you know, make a long story short, i ended up leaving cnn in early 2004, and i was at harvard, and i ended up spending quite a bit of time at something called the berkman center for internet and society. and i was looking at, you know, the rise of citizen media, and, you know, blogging all around the world and how this is challenging, you know, journalism, how it's challenging governments, you know, looking at it as a global phenomenon. but because i have this background in china, i speak chinese, i read chinese, i quickly became fascinated with what's happening in china and the fact that on the one hand, you know, you have an explosion of internet use, all kinds of networking sites and a lot of blogging going on, yet at the same time the government manages to control it well enough to prevent people from using the internet to organize an opposition. and the way in which they do

that, um, is fascinating. so because i had the language facility and because i was sort of starting to become interested, you know, i wrote one thing, and then suddenly people started asking me to write more things and help them with research and, you know, give a talk, you know, and kind of suddenly before i knew it, i was an expert on chinese internet censorship. >> host: how do they block a facebook or a chinese equivalent of facebook? >> guest: well, there's several different levels of censorship in china. so we have facebook itself, right? facebook itself is not based in china, it's on computer servers outside of china. so for web sites that are located outside of china hike facebook -- like facebook, what they do is they, basically, instruct the network that when somebody types in www.facebook.com or some variant thereof, you get an error message. you just get blank in your

browser. >> host: and they can stop that at the border? >> guest: they can stop that at the border. so that's what happens with youtube, it happens with blogger, it happens with twitter.com, it happens with, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of web sites or sometimes just certain pages. because they have the ability to catch certain keywords and so son. so there's a lot of stuff that's just blocked at the border, essentially, as you say. but that's just for the web sites that are outside of china. so then you've got all these chinese companies running chinese versions, you know, kind of facebook clones or, you know, various blog spot clones, you know, youtube clones. so they're not being blocked at the border. it's much more effective, why just block something when people can figure out how to get around the blocks, why block it when you can just take it off the

internet? so for companies, you know, if you're a chinese internet company, your computer servers are inside china, you're in chinese legal jurisdiction. the cops can show up, you know, at your facility and tell you to shut it down if you're not complying. and so you can tell the sites, okay, you know, this particular group on the chinese version of facebook, you know, needs to be shut down, these users need to be taken offline. this particular blog needs to be, you know, needs to go, be shut down on deactivated. or, you know, people's particular blog posts. so, for instance, um, you know, i kind of did a test on this recently. a chinese gentleman just got the nobel peace prize. and so a couple different things happened with that, right? so overseas web sites that talked about the news of him getting the nobel peace prize they were, of course, blocked -- >> host: so you couldn't go to

new york times -- >> guest: well, new york times in english they're not so worried about because it's kind of a small, elite -- you know, stuff doesn't go viral in english. they're really worried about the chinese stuff, voice of america chinese, bbc chinese and so on. but for on the chinese platform, so let's say i have a bunch of accounts on chinese blogging services. so i logged in, and i took an article about -- >> host: from here? >> guest: yes. i logged in, took an article, pasted it into the little, you know, compose your blog post here box, you know, hit publish, right? and you get an error message saying, we're sorry, you cannot publish this material, it contains sensitive words. so certain kinds of content you can't even get on the internet. or there were other servers where i managed to publish it, but within minutes it would disappear. and then you go back to the place where you had published it, and there's this notice

saying, you know, we're sorry, but, you know, the content you're looking for does not exist. and, um, so you -- oh, i'm sorry, excuse me, i was just -- let me just, so the content, literally, no longer exists in that spot. so, basically, you have a situation where it's not just blocking the content, but taking sensitive content off the internet completely. >> host: so this is a chinese policy within china. >> guest: uh-huh. >> host: chinese companies. why should we care? >> guest: that's a very good question. um, i think there are a number of reasons. one is that china is a model, really, for how a government uses private companies as an extension of it power. and, obviously, china's the most

extreme case, but there are a lot of governments who are seeing this and seeking to duplicate it in various ways. um, it's also something of a cautionary tale about the way in which private intermediaries can be used in an opaque way to manipulate speech and to conduct surveillance and why it's very, very important that this digital layer that we're all depending on now for our speech, that the way -- i mean, obviously, you need to have some kind of governance of this space. you need to keep pornographers, you know, there's all kinds of reasons why a company, you know, why it's a good thing that facebook is keeping, you know, certain types of people off their site. but, you know, how do we insure that this privately-operated layer is not doing things that

infringe upon our rights either at the behest of government or on their own, um, which diminish our ability to voice dissent and to organize politically and so on? and, of course, by no means equating the united states and china, their system and what they're doing has no basis in consent of the governed. but there are, i think, some concerns that people have in the u.s. and in other democracies about the extent to which there's going to be sufficient due process and the mechanisms will be set up. you know, you have democratically-elected politicians who are passing laws or requiring technical specifications so that we can, you know, fight crime, we can guard against cyber attacks, we can protect children, we can protect intellectual property.

these are all admirable goals. but how are we -- what kind of system are we setting up? how can it be abused if you have a government that is seeking to abuse its power? is the system transparent and accountable enough that you can correct for that? that's, i think, the real challenge we have in democracies. >> host: and about a year ago you wrote a column for mcclatchy news service, "are china's demands for internet self-discipline spreading to the west?" >> guest: uh-huh. >> host: do you see evidence of that? >> guest: well, again, it's a much more subtle thing. so there's a lot of debate in the west right now about the extent to which private intermediaries should be held liable for what their users are doing on the site. and because part of what goes on

in a place like china is that the government sets out rules, and then it's kind of left to the companies to decide, oh, you know, i better take this content down because it might get me in trouble. so you have a situation where companies are actually anticipating whether something may or may not be illegal, and they're taking it off. it might actually not be a violation of the law, but just to be safe they take it down. and so if you impose too much liability on intermediaries even for ostensibly good reasons, you could have a situation where intermediaries are taking things down that actually have a pretty good case that, you know, when really taken to court or challenged, that the person who put it up has the right to, to express that speech. and so the concern is about the erosion, um, of people's ability

to advocate opinions, to disseminate information that may not be particularly popular but, on the other hand, they have a first amendment right to say those things. and are we moving toward a situation where intermediaries are kind of making that decision just to be on the safe side before anybody's had their day in court? and this is why a lot of people are concerned about the amazon case, for instance, with wikileaks where amazon kicked wikileaks off their service. they were perfectly within their legal rights to do that in terms of service. absolutely nothing, you know, legally wrong with what they did. but you have a situation, again, where you have a private entity deciding that, well, maybe this person does have a first amendment right to say this, but i don't want to wait for the

case. this is too much trouble for me. i'm going to dump them now. and if collectively most private intermediaries end up doing that with their most controversial clients, then we do have a problem. so, again, you know, it's, it's subtle and one does not want to go too far in drawing equal signs at all. but there is a continuum of issues, and, you know, the other problem, too, is that, you know, this is a globally-interconnected network. and so you have technical norms and legal norms that are set up in democracies that make sense within a context of a country that has very robust legal system, very robust protections. but if you take the same technical norms, technical standards and dump them into iran or belarus which has been

happening, actually, you've got a bunch of cases where the mobile phone system is being sold by western companies to iran and belarus, you know, came with legal intercept capabilities so that law enforcement could intercept conversations which is required under european law and american law. so, you know, all this technology enables authorities to tap people. it's, basically, acceptable to most citizens of democracies within the confines of this legal and constitutional situation, but you take that same technology and you drop it into iran and belarus, you know, you've got a various active surveillance system. and so this, this is also a problem is that we're setting up norms that work better in some countries than in others, but they become the default in a world where you cannot count on governments and legal systems being on the side of the people. >> host: rebecca mackinnon,

google, facebook and bing have gotten -- and other company like that, search engines -- have gotten quite a bit of criticism about their business practices in china. should u.s. companies be setting foreign policy? shouldn't they just be following the rules as determined by that nation? >> guest: that's a difficult question. i mean, you know, there are issues related to corporate/social responsibility that sometimes go, that can sometimes get quite murky, right? so there are people who talk, for instance, about, you know, if you take some other industry, say, for instance, a mining company that goes into a an oppressive regime, and the regime says, you know, you have to allow our militias to do x, y and z, you know? and to what extent should facilities just go along and to what extent are they

facilitating human rights abuses? and there's beginning to be internationally a whole set of norms being set up for how, you know, there are codes of conduct about what companies shall not do despite the fact that the local government wants you to allow their militias to, you know, or wants you to fund their militias, you know? even if that's the law, you know, that's a problem internationally. and so with companies around the world, i mean, it's a tough situation, right? because on the one hand the internet has brought tremendous change and empowerment everywhere, and it certainly, china, the people of china are much better off with the internet than without it. and so -- to say that no company should be doing business in china is oversimplistic, and i don't support that idea. but i do think that companies need to be mindful about how they're going about doing business. so it's not a matter of being there or not being there, but it's about how you're engaging.

so you had a situation early on where yahoo! went into china with a chinese language service that they hosted inside chinese jurisdiction, and lo and behold, they ended up being complicit and jailing several dissidents because when the police showed up in yahoo!'s beijing office, if their chinese staff refused to happened over information, they too would go to jail. so that put them in a difficult position. when google went in, they chose not to offer a chinese version of gmail, and they decided to draw that line at, okay, we're not going to host user content inside china because we don't want to be in a portion of sharing it with the chinese police, but we'll experiment with the censoring of the search engine kind of thing. and they did that for a few years and ended up deciding they didn't want to do that anymore and moved their search engine out. and microsoft is still in there with their search engine and, you know, it's not being used by

many people. they're trying to split the difference a little more in terms of notifying users that censorship is happening and kind of telling the government we're only going to respond to legally-binding requests, and we're not going to respond to just some random phone call from a cop, you know? we need a court order, this kind of thing, to at least try and say, look, this needs to be grounded in the rule of law. but it's tough. it is, these are difficult situations for businesses. and sometimes it's very hard to know what the right thing is to do. but i think what we found with business and human rights and business and social responsibility in other sectors is that, look, you know, i could maximize my profit if i hire 12-year-olds and pollute the groundwater. but, you know, there are a whole set of social norms about why that is, you know, not something i should do. um, because i'm living in a

society and that, you know, over the long run not only is that the moral thing not to do, but, you know, i will prosper as a business in the long run if i'm perceived as being a good company and i'm actually doing things that are sustainable for the community. so companies, you know, in the internet and technology space are going to need to think about, you know, what kind of internet are we contributing to, what kind of internet are we helping to create? are we -- if we just go along with whatever every government wants us to do, are we going to destroy the value of the internet in the first place? i mean, the whole value of the internet is that people can connect around the world. and if that gets destroyed because people are saying, oh, well, in order to get in this market i have to do this, that and the other, um, you may end up destroying the value of the thing you're selling. so people definitely do need to think about the long run and also about their users, you

know, what you do in one country is going to have an impact on how users trust you in other countries. so if you're compromising people's freedom of speech and privacy in one market, people hear about it, and then they say, oh, i'm not sure if i want to use that company's service because such and such that happened in china. >> host: rebecca mackinnon, how ubiquitous is the use of technology and the advancement of technology in china? >> guest: so chi ma now has about 450 million internet users. >> host: and a billion and a half population? >> guest: yeah. it's kind of 1.3 or probably more than that now. i think they just did a census, we'll probably get an upgrade on that. but, yes, somewhere approaching a billion and a half population. so it's less than half of chinese people online, yet mobile phone use is many more times that. i don't have the figure off my

head, the latest figure off the top of my head. but i think mobile phone use is, like, 80%, you know? it's, you know, many times higher. um, so mobile phone penetration is very high, and you have a lot of internet services that kind of leverage that, you know, assuming that people are maybe, mainly using their phone sort of like chat services that you can use through your sms, but also interfaces with the internet. so, yes, a lot of growth there. and so it's a very attractive market. >> host: as a former journalist with cnn, did you ever have trouble doing a report? did your reports that you would send out ever get censored, or were you ever encouraged not to do something? >> guest: well, i got detained on quite a number of occasions. i got yelled at by the foreign ministry on a number of occasions. my boss got yelled at by the foreign ministry on a few occasions when he visited from, you know, from headquarters.

and at one point they threatened not to renew my visa. and, you know, a lot of access is kind of contingent on whether you behave. and so, like, well, you didn't behave, so we're not going to give you an interview with such and such official, or we're not going to let you go to that. happens all the time. so there was a lot of that kind of thing. um, but i was there at a time up until the very end when we started being able to send come pressed video out through the internet, most of the time i was there -- gle 92-2001 -- most of the time there was three ways to get your video out of china. one but through through a satele uplink which is controlled by the government. the other way is to fedex or air freight it to hong kong or tokyo, and they send it, they do

the satellite uplink to atlanta. so, you know, you're kind of planning in advance and so on. then the third way was somebody gets on a plane. so there were -- up until we got to the point where we could send compressed videos which really wasn't until 2000 for a bunch of reasons, people -- we had, you know, we were handing tapes to interns to fly down to hong kong. and i did a bunch of runs to hong kong with tapes on breaking news stories because we couldn't speed them on the satellites because they would shut it down. so it was challenging. i mean, now you can send just a compressed video file through broadband, but most of the way they control your reporting is they control your access to people. so people they don't want reporters interviewing, they put under house arrest. you know, that kind of thing. or they'll tell people, you're

not going to talk to journalists, you know? or they find ways to keep you from getting at, from getting access to things. so that's primarily -- >> host: so it doesn't sound like you won a lot of chinese self-discipline awards while you were over there. >> guest: no, i didn't. [laughter] >> host: is hong kong still free? i know it was recently rated as the number one open economy, but when it comes to technology and the use of the internet, is it still a unique area? >> guest: yes. to china? >> guest: after hong kong reverted to chinese rule in 1997, there was this deal made between the british and the chinese that the political system in hong kong would not change for 50 years. and so hong kong still has free speech protection so that the internet there is not censored. you can, you know, access -- that's why google moved to hong kong is that they don't have this problem in hong kong. you can, you've got all kinds of blogs, you've got, you know, the

fallen gun religious sect which is banned in china, has a big operation in hong kong. every year they do big parade, they're on the street every day, you know, as long as they don't violate the law, nobody can do anything about it. they're a big pro-democracy demonstrations in hong kong every year, there are dissidents from mainland china living in hong kong. so there is that protection. the problem is that the media in hong kong is owned primarily by business concerns who have business interests in mainland china. so a lot of, you know, there's a certain amount of kind of self-censorship or, you you kno, different people call it different things, and people debate how bad it is, but there are a lot of journalists in hong kong who complain that their editor told them not to pursue a particular story because the publisher, you know, has a concern, you know, has some other business in beijing and

might not get a license, you know? so kind of told to tone it down on certain things. >> host: and finally, rebecca mackinnon, what is global voices online and the global network initiative, and what's your involvement? >> guest: okay. well, they're two very different things despite both being called global. global voices online is an international bloggers and citizen media network that i founded along with a dear friend and can colleague of mine, ethan zuckerman, when i was up at harvard at the berkman center for internet and society. and the idea is there are people all over the world using the internet to talk about all kinds of very interesting things, and when we started it in 2004, the idea was, look, there are all these bloggers in the middle east or in africa, around asia who are talking about things happening in their countries that the media's not reporting on. just because, you know, the media can only report so much and etc., etc. but it's really hard to find these bloggers, um, unless you

know where to look. and then you have to know, well, who's credible? this guy who says he's blogging about lebanon, is he even in lebanon? how do you know? so we developed this team of bloggers around the world who kind of cure rate what's the most interesting stuff coming out of the world, so we have people doing digest about what's coming out of the arabic blogosphere this week, what are the hottest kind of conversations going on, or what's going on in the russian blogosphere and the russian internet? we've got several people who are following that. so it's a way to help, help, you know, people in the english-speaking world get a better handle on the conversations that are happening online globally, and we've got a lot of volunteers that are translating back and forth into different languages, so it's a lot of fun. it's a nonprofit. and then global network

initiative is, basically, t a multistake -- it's a multi-stakeholder initiative around free speech and privacy for the internet and telecommunications sector. so the idea was that we got together, it started coming together back in 2006 after google, yahoo! and microsoft got, and cisco got yelled at in congress for what they'd been doing in china. and some human rights groups and some academics and, um, some other free expression groups, the center for democracy and technology and others sort of began to convene some conversations with companies about, look, there need to be some bottom line principles here that we can all agree on for what companies will and will not do, um, when it comes to government requests for